


Exhumed

by divaofdespair



Series: Autopsy [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gabe being sad, I tried not to make it too dark but it still got a little dark because that's just who Reaper is, M/M, More angst, Reaper being unstable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 13:41:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8163916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divaofdespair/pseuds/divaofdespair
Summary: In the rare moments of sanity, Jack is still his anchor.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was playing Reaper on Route 66, there was a 76 waiting right outside the left side door for me, Reaper turned into a muse and spat 1200 words of angst at me. And since misery loves company I thought I might offer a very indulgent Reaper drabble dipped in tragedy and rolled in an angsty coating, with a light glaze of crazy and sadistic.

Reaper couldn't help but reflect on the irony of the situation he found himself in: Talon had been contracted by the Deadlock Gang to steal a payload off a train and escort it back to their base of operations on Route 66. Twenty-some years ago, Gabriel Reyes had dragged an extremely rowdy youth in an extremely stupid hat through the very diner that had been chosen as the rendezvous point. And he was standing in the exact spot where he had decided it'd be worth the trouble of choking the damn ingrate out so he could pick him up and just _carry_ him to the transport.

Sometimes, all it took was a memory to drag him back to sanity. 

The madness was all that he needed (all that he had) to convince himself that the pain was simply an annoyance. There was, of course, the pain of the nanomachines constantly consuming his decaying flesh as they regenerated it. But there was also the pain of the fact that this was some sick fuck's idea of divine punishment: he'd spent a lifetime being turned into a living weapon, and now he would spend until these nanomachines finally shit out having to kill just to alleviate the pain of existing for a while.

Trapped in his own personal Hell. _Should have paid better attention in Sunday school_ , his brain quipped in a last-ditch effort to make himself laugh, to lose himself in it. To think about that bitch Ziegler and what she'd done to him, let the rage back in, lose himself again in what he'd do to her when she inevitably picked up on the trail of corpses he was leaving like breadcrumbs, oh, the ways he would _break_ her, he'd make her beg for death like he had—

—but he could almost hear the kid's hollering now, swearing and making demands, and that stupid fucking accent punched right through the comfortable cloud of insanity. Just like that, he wasn't Reaper anymore. He was Gabriel Reyes, he remembered dying, remembered being dragged back, felt the pain, all of it, every cell of him being devoured as soon as it was created, remembered _Jack_...

This was why he kept pushing his boulder: the brief moments that he remembered he had been human once, he still _must_ be if he could feel pain like this. And sometimes knowing that he could still remember Jack and the entire fucked-up ride they'd taken each other on together—and how given the chance Gabriel would do it all again in a heartbeat, because Jack was worth dying for, that ride worth living through Hell for a thousand times over—was the only thing that kept him from trying to find out exactly how much abuse a constantly-regenerating body could take.

Really, the payphones were a facade, a network of visual and sensory projections over a fixed touchpad rigged up to match the old-timey aesthetic of the rest of the diner. He pulled a small jammer out of one of the packs he carried and attached it to the machine. Talon would monitor his communicators, but the phones in the diner were still basic comm tech. He could easily hook one up to a public satellite, and Talon didn't know he was here yet.

The number pad popped out of existence, and the touchscreen beneath displayed a jumble of information. The most basic, rushed encryption. It wasn't like he'd be able to hide anything from Sombra if she decided she suddenly cared what he was up to. He'd just have to hope she didn't.

He still remembered exactly how to patch into the channel they'd set up. Of course, it was empty now. Knowing a dead man's phone number rarely came in handy unless you enjoyed torturing yourself.

Or just needed to scream into an empty void sometimes.

There was a click, and the soft hiss of open air.  
"Jack.." he started, and his voice left him for a moment. Then the dam broke.

"It fucking _hurts_ , Jackie, everything fucking hurts so much all the time. And I just... I needed to talk to you, cariño, I didn't know what else to do because I miss you and that hurts more than everything else.  
"I was thinkin' about when Ana died, Jackie, or fuck, when we thought she did, I guess. About what you told me. I think about it a lot; I wonder if you remember. It was like three in the morning and I found you in the kitchen, and you were lookin' at this old picture of all three of us in some desert shithole or another. And you looked at me, Jackie, and I swear you smiled the prettiest, saddest goddamned smile I ever saw in my fuckin' life. I still carry that fuckin' picture and sometimes I look at it just to remember that smile. Broke my fuckin' heart, querido. But you started talkin' about your mom, 'bout how she used to tell you that you could only be as sad over someone as they'd made you happy, somethin' like that, it was a lot fuckin' prettier when you said it. And then I called you a sappy-ass maricón and that got you to laugh a little and—Fuck, Jack, you were so beautiful, I didn't tell you that enough, I didn't say I love you enough..."  
He was babbling now, he knew, but his inhibitions were otherwise occupied. The pain was unbearable and the madness lapped at Gabriel's senses, tempting him with its oblivion, and he still had so much to say.  
"You know, I'm sure you'll be here; Deadlock's tryin' to move a fuckin' nuke and I know you won't be able to turn down a chance to get to complain about cleaning up my messes again. I never know what I'm gonna' do when I see you, sunshine. It fuckin' scares me. This thing I am most of the time, it hates you, it wants you dead so I got nothin' else to hang on to, and that's my fault, too, 'cause I gotta' think about you and starve it just so I can breathe sometimes, this is all my fault and I'm sor—"

The small jammer he had used had been designed as a single-use device to patch through emergency calls. It chirped twice, announcing to the user that it was about to expend the last of its power to release a small EMP and fry itself along with whatever device it was attached to. The line clicked off, and Gabriel's sanity snapped along with the tenuous tether to Jack. Just like that, he was Reaper again.  
He drifted comfortably back into the madness, crushing the expended jammer in a clawed gauntlet and ripping the reciever off the phone, flinging it down the stairs to the diner's exit for good measure. _None_ of this was his fault. It was Ziegler's fault for doing this to him, it was Overwatch's fault for being complicit in all of the bullshit, it was Jack's fault most of all because Jack was the thread that connected every part of his tits-up joke of an existence.

He would feast on each one of their souls. But not before they suffered exquisitely.

He switched his communicator on. "Reaper here. Rendezvous is clear." 

One by one, the rest of the team checked in. ETA for the furthest agent out was three minutes. The train would pass over the bridge in just over an hour. The bombs were already set.

The pain wasn't bothering him so much now.


End file.
